Patriarchy Hannah and the Perverted Performance of Trad Wives

One of X's biggest tradwives is a 37-year-old single and childless woman living in her mom's basement

By now, a bajillion things have been written about trad wives. I feel somewhat responsible for this, because I’m pretty sure I was the first person to ever interview one, in early 2023, when I did a Q&A with Estee Williams, the buxom blonde TikTok tradwife who threw in the towel on her meteorology degree in order to submit to her husband. I disagreed with her entire worldview and expectation of women and I really wanted to hate her. The truth is that I couldn’t, she was sweet and vapid and head over heels in love with a man who had, probably, a bit of a thing for submissive blondes. Everyday before her husband would arrive home from his manual labor job, Estee would dress up in house dresses, do her hair and makeup and sit on the couch waiting for his car to pull in. She was either very bored or very horny. Every time I asked her about the sexual aspect of tradwifedom, she pushed back:

I think a lot of women associate the word “submissive” as something that happens in the bedroom.

Yeah, I think modern culture has it all twisted. Like they’ve turned the words “submitting” and “serving” into, I guess, a sexual thing, something totally different. And when I’ve talked about serving and submitting to my husband… I don’t talk about sex or anything like that on my channel. But I talk about serving him in the home, making sure that the home is ready for him. His life is easiest when he is home, he’s happy to be home. And women think that this is almost degrading. But this happens everywhere, like, when you go to work and your boss is telling you to do this, this and that. Is that not in some way submitting? People don’t talk negatively about that but they’ll talk about it when you’re married to somebody and you openly talk about submitting yourself to them. The Bible does talk about wives submitting to and serving their husbands, and that has definitely spoken to me from a biblical point to embrace this lifestyle.

And there’s nothing sexual about it? Some people are saying this is fetish content.

There’s nothing sexual about this lifestyle. And I’ve tried to keep sex out of my profile and stuff like that, like I don’t talk about if that makes sense.

But it’s hard to believe her, or any of the other online trad wives who shot to fame during a weird time, earning themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in brand deals and advertisements. A post I saw on X by Jeremy Boreing of The Daily Wire summarizes it, “90% of “trad wife” social is either cosplay or grift. It’s porn for women disillusioned by feminism and materialism just like 90% of the red pill movement is porn for men disillusioned by the same. Neither audience is wrong in their disillusionment, but this garbage is still just performance art being sold to them by frauds.”

This brings me to Patriarchy Hannah, the Twitter trad wife who home-schools her fourteen kids she shares with her ex-felon husband, Tony. They live in Tony Town, a town Tony bought and built houses on for their adult children and families. Hannah believes that women should live under the patriarchy because they lack the discernment that men have, and some of her large following agreed. But none of it is true, and after internet sleuth Ryan Duff did some digging on her, it turns out that “Patriarchy Hannah” is single and childless living in her mom’s basement in Arkansas.

The whole Patriarchy Hannah (real name Jennifer Bays) debacle would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. Bays clearly has mental health issues and is getting off on all of this. She would spend her days doling out advice to actual SAHMs about how to homeschool and how to have a happy marriage — unsurprisingly her tips would be that your husband is always right and you’d be smart to listen to everything he says. And before you ask, “how much influence can a random X account have on normal people,” the answer is more than you think. When I was reporting on child-free influencers on Instagram, some of their followers were sterilizing themselves because they felt so inspired by the accounts messaging. So, next time your favorite influencer tries selling you life advice or smoothies, make sure you don’t drink the kool-aid.